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Putin Is Gambling on the West Growing Impatient With Ukraine. We Have to Prove Him Wrong
Jonathan Freedland, Guardian UK
Freedland writes: "The image was stunning, the optics perfect: a war leader addressing the nation in an ancient hall, the rays of stained-glass sunlight all but crowning him with a halo. And yet there was something wrong with that picture."
A year into his country’s fight for its very survival, Volodymyr Zelenskiy knows some in Europe are looking for a way out
The image was stunning, the optics perfect: a war leader addressing the nation in an ancient hall, the rays of stained-glass sunlight all but crowning him with a halo. And yet there was something wrong with that picture. Volodymyr Zelenskiy was not stiffening the resolve of his own people, who after a year of war, bereavement and pain might be forgiven for losing heart. Rather, he was in Westminster to steady the nerves of British politicians – and, later, European ones – to ensure they do not abandon a fight that has cost them so much less.
His official request was for fighter planes – “Give us wings,” he said – but he had a wider purpose. His lightning trip to London, Paris and Brussels was aimed at ensuring the west does not grow impatient, that as the first anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, it does not start looking at its watch – and for an early way out.
It’s odd that it should be this way around. It is the Ukrainians who are doing the suffering; it is on their soil that trench warfare is once again under way – the kind of combat that many assumed had been banished into history, to be glimpsed only via lavish Netflix re-enactments. It is Ukrainian men who are living in the ground, in networks of trenches and subterranean shelters along a frontline that stretches for 1,500km (930 miles) – and yet it is fear of quiet on the western front that preoccupies Zelenskiy.
You can see why. Admittedly, the calls for Kyiv to agree to an immediate ceasefire and negotiate with Moscow are fairly marginal right now. It fell, for example, to the former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters to make that case to the United Nations this week, his stance as an anti-war campaigner neutral between the two combatants only slightly undermined by the fact that he spoke as the invited guest of the Russian delegation, and has described well-documented accounts of Russian war crimes as “lies, lies, lies”.
But others less easily dismissed have also begun to drum their fingers on the table, reminding Zelenskiy that all conflicts end in talks eventually, and so he should start thinking pragmatically now – among them no less than the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
Whether articulated by the arena rock left or the establishment right, it sounds like the reasonable, humanitarian position: who could be against an immediate end to this horrendous war? But it’s a hollow call.
For one thing, the conditions simply do not exist for the two sides to negotiate now. To quote a recent Prospect essay by Jonathan Powell, who played a critical role in brokering the Good Friday agreement, which turns 25 this spring: “Successful peace negotiations usually require both a mutually hurting stalemate (a specific concept in diplomacy) and leadership on both sides prepared to take political risks for peace. Neither condition currently exists,” in the case of Ukraine.
In Northern Ireland, neither the British government nor the IRA could see a path to military victory: it was that stalemate that made negotiations possible. But, wrote Powell, “Both Ukraine and Russia still think they can achieve their objectives militarily.”
What complicates things further is the specific figure of Putin. It’s not clear that the traditional carrot-and-stick calculus works with him. If Ukraine and its western allies were to de-escalate, Putin’s past conduct suggests he would see that as weakness and press harder. But if Kyiv and its backers were to escalate, the same track record suggests an identical response: he would feel compelled to appear strong and hit back. Nor does the huge number of casualties on his own side count as any kind of pressure on Putin: given the clampdown on all internal dissent inside Russia, public grief is scarcely a consideration. He is happy to keep sending his young men into the meat grinder.
Watch the third episode of Norma Percy’s riveting new BBC documentary series Putin vs the West, and it becomes clearer still that the traditional methods don’t apply. Zelenskiy tells Percy of his repeated requests to join Nato: the alliance kept rebuffing him for fear of antagonising Putin. Several European nations extended that caution into the rest of their dealings with Putin, attempting emollience even in early 2022, hoping not to provoke him into invading Ukraine. But it was all in vain: Putin invaded anyway.
Still, let’s say that could be overcome, and somehow it was possible to get Putin and Zelenskiy to agree an immediate ceasefire. It would not end the suffering. Contemplate for a moment the fate of those places conquered by Putin, which would remain in Russian hands under an armistice that would freeze the current map in place. Think for a moment of what has happened already in those places: the mass rape in Bucha; the massacre in Mariupol; the torture chambers in Izium; the mass deportations of Ukrainians to Russia, including the transfer of hundreds of thousands of children, to face forced adoption and “Russification”. Those crimes would not end if there were a ceasefire. They would continue, except now Russia would have an even freer hand.
And who believes that Putin would stop there? What grounds would a Ukrainian have to trust that the Russian leader would be content to pocket the gains he had won and leave it at that? One would have to ignore everything that has happened these last two decades. Much more likely is that Putin would simply regard an armistice as a pause to regroup for the next push. After all, he is not after a mere adjustment of boundaries: he has been clear that he regards the very existence of an independent Ukraine as an affront to Russia. Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s former foreign minister, tells Percy: “You cannot bargain with him. Putin does not need anything from us. There is no reward, no building or city or prize. He wants us not to exist.”
Of course, enemies in every conflict would say their adversary is uniquely evil or impervious to reason. Often that assessment is wrong. But sometimes the world really does face a threat of a different order. Putin’s dictatorship inside Russia’s borders and his repeated territorial expansion beyond them – whether in Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014 or the rest of Ukraine in 2022 – suggest a man bent on reviving the spectres that haunted Europe in the middle of the last century. He has played the long game and is playing it again now, gambling that he can absorb more death and devastation than we can, that we have less stomach for it, even when it’s not our people who are doing the dying. He believes he has greater strength and greater patience. It’s no exaggeration to say that the fate of Europe depends on proving him wrong.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada at an event in January. 'I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,' Mr. Trudeau said in a Twitter post on Saturday. (photo: Carlos Osorio/Reuters)
Trudeau and Biden Order the Shoot Down of Yet Another "Object" in Canadian Air Space
Helene Cooper, The New York Times
Cooper writes: "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he and President Biden had ordered the object violating Canadian airspace to be taken down, a day after another object was shot out of the sky near Alaska."
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he and President Biden had ordered the object violating Canadian airspace to be taken down, a day after another object was shot out of the sky near Alaska.
An American fighter jet, acting on the orders of President Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, shot down another unidentified flying object on Saturday, Canadian and American officials said, in the latest installment of the drama playing out in the skies of North America.
“I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” Mr. Trudeau said in a statement posted on Twitter. He said an American F-22 with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is operated jointly by the United States and Canada, downed the object over the Yukon Territory.
As with the object that Mr. Biden ordered shot down near Alaska on Friday, officials said they had yet to determine just what had been blasted out of the sky over the Yukon, which borders Alaska.
Mr. Trudeau said he had spoken with Mr. Biden on Saturday afternoon. “Canadian Forces will now recover and analyze the wreckage of the object,” he said in his Twitter post.
The White House said in a statement Saturday that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trudeau had “discussed the importance of recovering the object in order to determine more details on its purpose or origin.”
Late Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration briefly closed an area near Havre, Mont., to air traffic. The agency had used similar terminology a week earlier, just before the United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. A joint statement from NORAD and U.S. Northern Command later said that NORAD had detected a radar anomaly and sent fighter aircraft to investigate, but they did not find anything that correlated with the radar hits. Officials have acknowledged that a heightened awareness could lead to false positives.
The object taken down over the Yukon was picked up on radar as it passed over Alaska late Friday, Pentagon officials said earlier on Saturday. NORAD sent American fighter jets, which were soon joined by Canadian fighters, to track it.
“Monitoring continued today as the object crossed into Canadian airspace,” said Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary. The F-22 shot down the object over Canadian territory using the same Sidewinder air-to-air missile that was used to take down two previous flying objects, General Ryder said, including the Chinese spy balloon a week earlier.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin spoke by phone Saturday with his Canadian counterpart, Anita Anand, General Ryder said. Speaking at a news conference that evening, Ms. Anand described the object as cylindrical and said it was smaller than the spy balloon taken down over the Atlantic the previous weekend.
It is believed to be rare for the United States to shoot down unidentified flying objects. But tensions in the U.S. have been high ever since the discovery of the Chinese spy balloon in American skies about two weeks ago, prompting Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken to cancel a planned trip to China. The Chinese government acknowledged that the dirigible was one of its own, though it said it was for weather research. Beijing said a similar balloon that was spotted over Central and South America the same weekend was also for civilian purposes.
American intelligence agencies have determined that China’s spy balloon program is part of a global surveillance effort designed to collect information on the military capabilities of countries around the world, according to three American officials.
The balloon flights, some officials believe, are part of an effort by China to hone its ability to gather data about American military bases — in which it is most interested — as well as those of other nations in the event of a conflict or rising tensions. U.S. officials said this week that the balloon program had operated out of multiple locations in China.
On Friday, U.S. officials disclosed that the military had shot down an unidentified flying object over the Arctic Ocean near Alaska. John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a press briefing that the object had been downed “out of an abundance of caution.”
Troops with U.S. Northern Command were working on Saturday near Deadhorse, Alaska, with Alaska National Guard units, the F.B.I. and local law enforcement to recover the object and determine its nature, Defense Department officials said.
With the recovery activities taking place on sea ice, in freezing temperatures and with limited daylight, service members are being forced to move slowly, the officials said.
“We have no further details at this time about the object, including its capabilities, purpose and origin,” the Pentagon said in a statement about the Alaskan incident.
There were multiple theories in Washington as to the provenance of the objects, but several Biden administration officials cautioned that much remained unknown about the last two objects shot down. The United States has long monitored U.F.O.s that enter American airspace, and officials believe that surveillance operations by foreign powers, weather balloons or other airborne clutter may explain the most recent incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena — government-speak for U.F.O.s — as well as many episodes in past years.
However, nearly all of the incidents remain officially unexplained, according to a report that was made public in 2021. Intelligence agencies are set to deliver a classified document to Congress by Monday updating that report. The original document looked at 144 incidents between 2004 and 2021 that were reported by U.S. government sources, mostly American military personnel.
The object that U.S. military officials eventually identified as a Chinese surveillance balloon was first spotted over Alaska on Jan. 28, though it did not raise red flags at the time. It then floated into Canadian territory before re-entering American airspace over Idaho on Jan. 31. Military officials did not deem it a threat, and out of concern for civilians on the ground, waited to shoot it down until it reached the Atlantic on Feb. 4.
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Mark Pomerantz, seen outside court in New York in 2002. (photo: David Karp/AP)
People vs Donald Trump Review: Mark Pomerantz Pummels Manhattan DA
Lloyd Green, Guardian UK
Green writes: "Prosecutor who helped convict John Gotti thinks Alvin Bragg let Trump slip from the hook."
Prosecutor who helped convict John Gotti thinks Alvin Bragg let Trump slip from the hook. His memoir proves controversial
Mark Pomerantz is a well-credentialed former federal prosecutor. As a younger man he clerked for a supreme court justice and helped send the mob boss John Gotti to prison. He did stints in corporate law. In 2021, he left retirement to join the investigation of Donald Trump by the Manhattan district attorney. Pomerantz’s time with the DA was substantive but controversial.
In summer 2021, he helped deliver an indictment for tax fraud against the Trump Organization and Alan Weisselberg, its chief financial officer. At the time, Cy Vance Jr, the son of Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, was Manhattan DA. Pomerantz also interviewed Michael Cohen, Trump fanboy turned convicted nemesis, pored over documents and clamored for the indictment of the former president on racketeering charges.
For Pomerantz, nailing Trump for his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who claims an affair Trump denies, didn’t pass muster. But that avenue of prosecution was a “zombie case” that wouldn’t die. It still hasn’t: a Manhattan grand jury again hears evidence.
Pomerantz saw Trump as a criminal mastermind aided by flunkies and enforcers. He believed charges ought to align with the gravity of the crimes. But as Pomerantz now repeatedly writes in his memoir, Alvin Bragg, elected district attorney in November 2021, did not want to move against Trump. In early 2022, Bragg balked. In March, Pomerantz quit – and leaked his resignation letter.
“I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the penal law,” Pomerantz fumed. “I fear that your decision means that Mr Trump will not be held fully accountable for his crimes.”
Now comes the memoir, People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account. It is a 300-page exercise in score-settling and scorn. Pomerantz loathes Trump and holds Bragg in less than high regard. He equates the former president with Gotti and all but dismisses the DA as a progressive politician, not an actual crime-fighter.
In a city forever plagued by crime and political fights about it, Bragg’s time as DA has proved controversial: over guns, trespassing, turnstile jumping, marijuana and, yes, the squeegee men.
Bragg is African American. This week, a group of high-ranking Black officials protested against Pomerantz’s attacks. In response, Pomerantz called Bragg “respected, courageous, ethical and thoughtful” but said: “I disagreed with him about the decision he made in the Trump case.”
In his resignation letter, Pomerantz wrote: “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice.”
Trump, he now writes, “seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law”. That may conjure up images of Road Runner and Wile E Coyote but Pomerantz is serious. “In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organised crime family.”
The Goodfellas vibe is integral to Trumpworld. In The Devil’s Bargain, way back in 2017, Joshua Green narrated how Trump tore into Paul Manafort, his then campaign manager, shouting: “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?” It was if Trump was channeling Joe Pesci.
With the benefit of hindsight, Pomerantz concludes that the US justice department is better suited to handle a wholesale financial investigation of Trump than the Manhattan DA. Then again, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, has a lot on his plate. An insurrection is plenty.
Pomerantz’s book has evoked strong reactions. Trump is enraged, of course. On Truth Social, he wrote: “Crooked Hillary Clinton’s lawyer [Pomerantz says he has never met her], radically deranged Mark Pomerantz, led the fake investigation into me and my business at the Manhattan DA’s Office and quit because DA Bragg, rightfully, wanted to drop the ‘weak’ and ‘fatally flawed’ case. This is disgraceful conduct by Pomerantz, especially since, as always, I’ve done nothing wrong!”
Really?
In December, a Manhattan jury convicted the Trump Organization on 17 counts of tax fraud and the judge imposed a $1.6m fine. Alan Weisselberg pleaded guilty and testified against his employer. Trump and three of his children – Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric – are defendants in a $250m civil lawsuit brought by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on fraud-related charges. That case comes to trial in October 2023, months before the presidential primary. Sooner than that will be the E Jean Carroll trial, over alleged defamation and a rape claim Trump denies.
Significantly, state prosecutors say Pomerantz may have crossed an ethical line.
“By writing and releasing a book in the midst of an ongoing case, the author is upending the norms and ethics of prosecutorial conduct and is potentially in violation of New York criminal law,” J Anthony Jordan, president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, announced.
Bragg accused Pomerantz of violating a confidentiality agreement. Pomerantz is unbowed. “I am comfortable that this book will not prejudice any investigation or prosecution of Donald Trump,” he states on the page. No formal ethics complaint has appeared.
Pomerantz also offers a window on personalities that crossed his path. Cohen receives ample attention. Pomerantz lauds Trump’s former fixer for his cooperation but reiterates that Cohen pleaded guilty to perjury.
His conduct left Pomerantz shaking his head. Cohen’s liking for publicity could be unsettling. So was his Oval Office tête-a-tête with Trump over the payment to Daniels. Pomerantz was disgusted. Trump and Cohen, he writes, defiled America’s Holy of Holies, its “sanctum sanctorum”.
No harm, no foul. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, announced: “Mr Cohen will continue to cooperate with DA Bragg and his team, speaking truth to power – as he has always done.” On Wednesday, Cohen met the Manhattan DA for the 15th time. Pomerantz is gone. The show goes on.
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Macaws sit on a tree in the Amazon rainforest in Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil, October 26, 2022. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Brazil Amazon Deforestation Drops in Lula's First Month in Office
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Deforestation in Brazil’s section of the Amazon rainforest dropped by 61 percent in January, the first month in office for left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has promised to relaunch environmental protection efforts."
Experts say January decrease is ‘positive’, but caution it is too soon to say whether it marks a long-term reversal.
Deforestation in Brazil’s section of the Amazon rainforest dropped by 61 percent in January, the first month in office for left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has promised to relaunch environmental protection efforts.
Preliminary satellite data collected by the government’s space research agency Inpe and released on Friday showed 167sq km (64sq miles) cleared in the region last month, down from the 430sq km (166sq miles) lost in January 2022.
But experts cautioned that while the decrease was a good sign, it is still too early to say that the deforestation, which surged under Lula’s predecessor, far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, has been reversed.
“It is positive to see such a relevant drop in January,” said Daniel Silva, a conservation specialist at the Brazilian branch of the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF-Brasil). “However, it is still too early to talk about a trend reversal, as part of this drop may be related to greater cloud cover.”
WWF-Brasil also pointed out that deforestation usually peaks in the dry season, beginning in June.
“The action plans for prevention and control of deforestation and forest fires must be restructured as a matter of urgency so that Brazil rediscovers its role as an international environmental leader,” said Frederico Machado, another specialist with the group.
Deforestation increased dramatically under Bolsonaro, who was narrowly defeated by Lula in October elections and had promoted more mining and economic development in Brazil’s sprawling Amazon region.
Environmental and Indigenous rights groups had blamed the Bolsonaro administration’s policies for the increase in deforestation and illicit activities in the Amazon, including illegal gold mining, as well as an uptick in violence against Indigenous communities in the area.
The new deforestation data came shortly before Lula, who previously served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, met his United States counterpart, President Joe Biden, in Washington, DC, later on Friday.
The two leaders were expected to discuss support for democracy, as well as efforts to fight climate change, among other issues. Lula has promised to get deforestation down to zero in the Amazon rainforest, roughly two-thirds of which lies in Brazil.
“Our shared values and our strong ties between our people … put us on the same page, but particularly – especially – [on] the climate crisis,” Biden told the Brazilian president in the Oval Office ahead of the meeting.
“Thank you Mr President for your commitment to advancing our partnership. This is an important moment for both our countries, in my view, and for the world quite frankly,” Biden added.
On the eve of the talks, the Reuters news agency reported that the US was considering its first contribution to a multilateral fund aimed at fighting Amazon deforestation, with a possible announcement coming during the Biden-Lula meeting.
The Brazilian-administered Amazon Fund, supported mainly by Norway and Germany, was reactivated by environment minister Marina Silva the day she took office last month, after being frozen since 2019 under Bolsonaro.
In late January, German development minister Svenja Schulze announced that Berlin would make $38m available for the Amazon Fund, saying Lula’s administration offered “a great chance to protect the forest and to offer a new perspective to the people who live there”.
Germany also pledged to provide $87m in low-interest loans for farmers to restore degraded areas and $34m for Brazilian states in the Amazon region to protect the rainforest.
Yet even with the positive start to the year, experts and staff at Brazil’s environmental agency Ibama have warned that it may take years for Lula to deliver on conservation targets after Bolsonaro cut funding and staff at key agencies.
Still, the new Brazilian government has already taken some steps in its push to reverse environmental degradation in the Amazon.
Earlier this week, the authorities launched raids to remove illegal gold miners from Indigenous territories in the region, where they have been blamed for violent attacks and a health crisis affecting the Yanomami people.
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President Donald Trump meets with Mohammed bin Salman, then Saudi Arabia's deputy crown prince, in the White House in 2017 as White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, right, listens. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
After Helping Prince's Rise, Trump and Kushner Benefit From Saudi Funds
Michael Kranish, The Washington Post
Kranish writes: "In early 2021, as Donald Trump exited the White House, he and his son-in-law Jared Kushner faced unprecedented business challenges. Revenue at Trump’s properties had plummeted during his presidency, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters made his brand even more polarizing."
An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict
In early 2021, as Donald Trump exited the White House, he and his son-in-law Jared Kushner faced unprecedented business challenges. Revenue at Trump’s properties had plummeted during his presidency, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters made his brand even more polarizing. Kushner, whose last major business foray had left his family firm needing a $1.2 billion bailout, faced his own political fallout as a senior Trump aide.
But one ally moved quickly to the rescue.
The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source, according to previously unreported details of Securities and Exchange Commission forms reviewed by The Washington Post. His business used a commonly employed strategy that allows many equity firms to avoid transparency about funding sources, experts said.
A year after his presidency, Trump’s golf courses began hosting tournaments for the Saudi fund-backed LIV Golf. Separately, the former president’s family company, the Trump Organization, secured an agreement with a Saudi real estate company that plans to build a Trump hotel as part of a $4 billion golf resort in Oman.
The substantial investments by the Saudis in enterprises that benefited both men came after they cultivated close ties with Mohammed while Trump was in office — helping the crown prince’s standing by scheduling Trump’s first presidential trip to Saudi Arabia, backing him amid numerous international crises and meeting with him repeatedly in D.C. and the kingdom, including on a final trip Kushner took to Saudi Arabia on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
New details about their relationship have emerged in recently published memoirs, as well as accounts in congressional testimony and interviews by The Post with former senior White House officials. Those revelations include Kushner’s written account of persuading Trump to prioritize Saudi Arabia over the objections of top advisers and a former secretary of state’s assertion in a book that Trump believed the prince “owed” him.
They also underscore the crucial nature of Trump’s admission that he “saved” Mohammed in the wake of the CIA’s finding that the crown prince ordered the killing or capture of Post contributing opinion columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Now, with Trump running for president again, some national security experts and two former White House officials say they have concerns that Trump and Kushner used their offices to set themselves up to profit from their relationship with the Saudis after the administration ended.
“I think it was an obvious opportunity for them to build their Rolodexes,” John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser, said in an interview. “And I think they were probably hard at work at it, particularly Jared.”
“Why should Jared be worried about the Middle East?” Bolton said. “It’s a perfectly logical inference was that had something to do with business.”
Kushner declined to comment.
In his memoir, Kushner did not mention his new equity firm or the Saudi investment, and he has not publicly addressed whether he talked to Mohammed during the administration about doing business with him afterward. It is not known whether Kushner discussed business deals with Mohammed while in office.
A former administration official allied with Kushner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter publicly, said there are numerous examples of top former government employees doing business with people they once dealt with while in public service. Kushner had such a broad agenda that it would be unfair to block business relationships with those he knew from his White House days, the former official said.
Trump declined to comment. His spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in response: “President Trump is the most pro-America president in history and used his superior negotiating skills to ensure this country is never beholden to anyone.” Eric Trump, Trump’s son who is also the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said in a statement that “LIV is doing incredible things for the game of golf and it should be no surprise that we were asked to host these amazing events.” Trump has also previously said he did tens of millions of dollars of business with Saudis before becoming president.
The Saudi Embassy in Washington and a spokesman for the Saudi Public Investment Fund did not respond to requests for comment.
Democrats who have launched congressional investigations into Trump’s and Kushner’s ties to Saudi Arabia said there is no precedent for how the two have relied so significantly on Saudi investments in their businesses after directly helping Mohammed while in office. The lawmakers expressed concern that such business ties could leave them beholden to the crown prince if they return to the White House.
“The financial links between the Saudi royal family and the Trump family raise very serious issues,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and for several years has been investigating various ties between the Saudis, Trump and Kushner, “and when you factor in Jared Kushner’s financial interests, you are looking right at the cat’s cradle of financial entanglements.”
Those concerns come at a high-stakes moment in the fraught U.S.-Saudi relationship. The investments by the Saudis came as the U.S. State Department said in a 2021 report that there continued to be “significant human rights issues” in Saudi Arabia, citing “credible reports” of torture and executions for nonviolent offenses. President Biden, who has backed away from a campaign pledge to hold the kingdom to account for human rights abuses, clashed openly with Riyadh in the fall over cuts in oil production. Trump, if he is reelected, may be less likely to confront the Saudi regime in future crises due to his financial entanglements, experts say.
Retired military personnel are required under ethics rules to obtain approval to work for foreign governments like Saudi Arabia. But there’s no requirement for Trump, a former commander in chief, nor for former senior White House officials such as Kushner, to disclose if they have financial ties to foreign governments, according to Don Fox, former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics. He said their work has exposed a glaring shortfall in ethics laws that needs to be fixed by Congress.
“I think the Congress had a certain vision in mind for what the post-presidency looks like, such as creating a library and museum and some speaking and writing a memoir,” Fox said. “I don’t think it ever occurred to the drafters of these ethics laws that a former president would actually try to cash in on his years of office this way.”
A beneficial relationship
Shortly after Trump’s election in 2016, Kushner connected with Mohammed for the first time.
Both were ascendant young scions of powerful families. Kushner, a 35-year-old with no foreign policy experience, was tapped by Trump to work toward Middle East peace; Mohammed, a 31-year-old deputy crown prince, was eyeing a path to the throne that seemed blocked by the reigning crown prince.
Over the next four years, that relationship would prove extraordinarily beneficial to both men.
Mohammed would reap arms sales, a presumed green light to blockade his neighboring nation of Qatar — despite a major U.S. military base there — and a hands-off policy when he imprisoned an array of leading Saudi citizens for months in a high-end hotel, reportedly demanding billions in funds from some in exchange for their release.
Trump and Kushner would get Mohammed’s support for an anti-terrorism center, arms purchases, and a deal normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and other nations.
Kushner was the key, making regular trips to Saudi Arabia and staying in close contact with Mohammed — to the concern of some White House colleagues. Two former senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said they often felt they were in the dark on sensitive diplomatic issues on which Kushner took the lead.
“I didn’t really know what Jared was doing with the Saudis,” one former administration official said. “That was part of the problem. We didn’t know what Jared was doing generally. And, you know, other governments had decided that you want to get close to Trump, the way to do it is through Jared.”
At the outset, the Saudis had decided the incoming Trump administration could offer a reset to U.S. relations with the kingdom, despite Trump’s campaigning by saying that “Islam hates us” and calling for a “Muslim ban” of immigrants, Kushner wrote in his memoir.
Kushner “was learning diplomacy on the fly,” he wrote in his memoir. Mohammed’s associates sensed Kushner’s inexperience during a post-election meeting. In a summary of the 2016 talk by Saudi officials reported by the Lebanese publication Al Akhbar, Mohammed’s advisers wrote: “Kushner made clear his lack of familiarity with the history of Saudi-American relations.”
It soon became clear that Kushner effectively was running foreign policy on Saudi Arabia.
In March 2017, Mohammed arrived in Washington and had lunch with Kushner and Trump at the White House. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson didn’t attend, and the meeting went against advice from Trump’s National Security Council. Tillerson could not be reached for comment.
That same month, Kushner asked Trump to make Saudi Arabia the site of his first foreign trip. Kushner said it could jump-start the administration’s Middle East policy by cultivating Mohammed to help forge a diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Tillerson opposed rewarding the Saudis with the first trip, and Trump told Kushner that he planned to follow the secretary of state’s advice. As Kushner continued to push, he wrote, Trump told him, “Jared, read my lips: we’re not going to Saudi Arabia. Take no for an answer!”
It didn’t matter. As Kushner told it, he had seen Trump change his mind on other matters, so “I didn’t interpret his words as a hard no.”
Kushner wrote that he called Mohammed and told the prince, “Everyone here is telling me that I’m a fool for trusting you,” but after receiving assurances from the prince, he outlined a proposal to Trump: The Saudis would denounce terrorism in the region, sign deals that were supposed to create American jobs and purchase U.S. arms. Trump changed his no to a yes. The trip was on.
It was the first of Kushner’s many boons to Mohammed, who used Trump’s visit to aid his sudden rise over a rival to become crown prince later that year. At a dinner, Mohammed told Kushner about a Saudi plan to blockade Qatar, which has a large U.S. military base. Tillerson later told Congress that the conversation made him “angry” because he didn’t have a say, but Trump essentially endorsed the move on Twitter.
One of the starkest tests of the Trump administration’s relationship with Mohammed came as a result of the prince’s ire with Khashoggi, a prominent journalist with ties to the royal family who had called for changes in the kingdom. Shortly after Trump’s election, Mohammed’s aides had ordered him to stop writing critically about the U.S.-Saudi relationship, but he refused and later relocated to the Washington area and became a columnist for The Post.
In October 2018, an assassination team that had flown from Riyadh to Istanbul aboard two planes owned by the Public Investment Fund killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate there. After Turkey said Saudi Arabia was responsible, Kushner talked with Mohammed about how to respond.
The next month, the CIA concluded that Mohammed had “approved an operation” to kill or capture Khashoggi, which the prince denied. Mohammed’s years-long effort to rise to power was in grave danger.
But, as Trump later put it in a recorded interview, “I saved his ass,” according to “The Trump Tapes” by Post associate editor Bob Woodward. Trump refused to endorse the CIA’s conclusion, equivocated about Mohammed’s involvement, opposed releasing of the report and vetoed a congressional bill to block arms sales to the kingdom. The president sent Mike Pompeo, who had replaced Tillerson as secretary of state, to meet with the prince and remind him of his debt.
“My Mike, go and have a good time. Tell him he owes us,” Pompeo recalled in his 2023 memoir, “Never Give An Inch.” Pompeo did not respond to a request for comment.
It was a pivotal moment that halted efforts to isolate Mohammed, who is known as MBS, in Congress and around the world. “Without the absolute protection of Trump and Kushner, MBS would definitely have fallen,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, the director for the Gulf at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a group founded by Khashoggi. Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee, said in a statement to The Post that Trump and Kushner “covered for the Crown Prince.”
Before Trump left office, Kushner flew to Saudi Arabia in early January 2021 for his final official meeting with Mohammed. On the public agenda was finalizing an agreement to end Riyadh’s blockade against Qatar.
Kushner flew home on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, and rushed to the White House.
Troubled businesses
As his administration ended, Trump’s brand was troubled. His family’s hotels, resorts and other properties had lost $120 million in revenue in 2020 thanks to the pandemic and his polarizing presidency. He faced multiple investigations into his business practices and actions seeking to overturn his 2020 defeat; then in December 2022, the Trump Organization was convicted of tax fraud.
Kushner, meanwhile, faced potential difficulties because of both his association with Trump and his own failings. Kushner’s family company had already required a bailout in 2018 from a Canadian firm because of his decision to buy a $1.8 billion office building in New York. An ongoing congressional investigation is looking into whether the bailout was partially financed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Now, despite having no experience running a private equity fund, Kushner was in search of billions of dollars for his new venture.
Saudi Arabia, however, soon invested in both men.
The day after the Trump administration ended, Kushner created a company called A Fin Management and used that as a springboard to create a private equity fund later that year called Affinity Partners. Such funds typically use investor money to buy into emerging companies.
Kushner has not said when he first sought $2 billion from the Saudi’s Public Investment Fund. The four members of a five-person panel of the fund’s advisers who attended a meeting about the matter were “not in favor” of the investment, citing Kushner’s inexperience in private equity and the fact that the Saudis would bear most of the risk, the New York Times reported, citing confidential minutes of the panel’s meeting in June 2021 that have not been made public.
Shortly after that meeting, however, Mohammed led the full board in approving the investment, according to the Times report.
In March 2022, the Kushner-run company filed an investment adviser registration document called Form ADV with the SEC that requires only a vague report on where its money came from. Kushner’s company declared that $2.51 billion out of its total $2.54 billion in assets under management came from “non-United States persons.”
The form also asks whether the “type of client” is “sovereign wealth funds and foreign official institutions.” Kushner’s firm left that box blank, instead describing its client as pooled funds operated by his company, which subsequently confirmed the Times report that $2 billion had come from the Saudis.
Chad Mizelle, an adviser to Kushner’s company, said in a statement to The Post that “Affinity Partners’ Form ADV, like numerous other private equity firms, correctly states that it has pooled investment vehicles as clients.” An SEC spokesman declined to comment.
Kushner’s company stands to receive a $25 million management fee annually from the Saudi investment plus a share of the profits.
Kushner has made his work with Mohammed while in the White House a selling point for his business. In a presentation to investors, first reported by the Intercept, Kushner notes his work “managing Middle East peace efforts” and specifically cites the result of his Jan. 5, 2021, meeting with Mohammed, saying they had discussed lifting the Qatar blockade.
There’s little transparency in private equity firms like Kushner’s. Such funds are allowed to keep secret the names of their investors, which has led Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, to push for legislation requiring more disclosure of foreign investments. The FBI said in 2020 that “threat actors likely use private placement of funds, including investments offered by hedge funds and private equity firms, to launder money.”
Kushner’s company, which is staffed by a number of former top administration officials, has so far allocated only about 15 percent of its available cash — a strategic move as it waits for the economy to improve, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business decisions.
Information about Trump’s possible Saudi payments is even more opaque. Before his political career, Trump had long claimed a profitable history of dealmaking with the Saudis.
On the day he launched his campaign at Trump Tower in 2015, he said, “I love the Saudis. Many are in this building.” Later that year, he said at a campaign rally that “they spend $40 million, $50 million” buying his apartments. In August 2015, The Post reported, he established eight shell companies that included the name “Jeddah,” apparently referring to Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city, and four mentioned a hotel — but there’s no record that anything resulted, The Post reported.
Starting last year, LIV Golf hosted two tournaments at Trump properties, with recent court proceedings revealing that the Public Investment Fund covers 100 percent of tournament costs, according to coverage of the case.
A LIV Golf spokesman declined to comment, and a Public Investment Fund spokesman did not respond to requests to comment.
LIV Golf, which was set up as a competitor to the PGA Tournament, has struggled to attract top golfers. After the PGA pulled a tournament from a Trump course following the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump boosted the LIV tour, calling it a public relations coup worth billions of dollars for Saudi Arabia and urging golfers to “take the money” and join LIV. He has not said how much he earned from the arrangement.
Ted Bishop, a former PGA president, said in an interview that a major tournament typically pays $2 million to $3 million to play on a course, not counting other revenue such as sponsorships, merchandise, and food and beverage.
Critics of LIV Golf have called the Saudi funding an effort at “sportswashing,” meant to divert attention from the killing of Khashoggi and its record on human rights. “I think the vast majority of golf fans oppose LIV Golf because it is a moral question,” Bishop said.
The Trump Organization in November signed a deal with a Saudi Arabian firm, Dar Al Arkan, to develop Trump-branded villas, a hotel and a golf course in Oman with the support of that country’s government. Such branding was once the mainstay of Trump’s international business, but the Oman agreement was the first such international deal publicly announced after he left office.
Eric Trump said in a statement that “Trump Oman is an exceptional project, in an exceptional location and we are excited to enter that rapidly growing market with an incredible hotel, world class golf course and much much more.”
Democrats have continued to push for more details about Donald Trump’s and Kushner’s deals.
The House Oversight Committee said in a June 2 letter to Kushner that it wanted to know if he had “improperly traded” on his government position to get the investment and whether he influenced U.S. policy to do so.
The committee’s investigation has stalled as a result of the Republican takeover of the House, but Wyden’s Senate Finance Committee may request the same documents as part of a broader inquiry in whether there is a connection between what Trump and Kushner did during the administration and the subsequent Saudi deals.
“Following the money is the premier issue,” Wyden said. “That’s how you understand potential conflicts of interest.”
Mohammed, meanwhile, has continued his rise to power and is expected to become king when the current monarch dies or steps down.
Biden, who vowed during his 2020 campaign to make Saudi Arabia “the pariah that they are” over Khashoggi’s murder, traveled to Saudi Arabia in July and fist-bumped Mohammed. Then his administration said that under international law, Mohammed was immune from a lawsuit in the Khashoggi killing because he had been named the sitting head of his government.
Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of the Khashoggi-founded group DAWN, has called on Congress to pass legislation to prohibit all former senior U.S. officials from working for, or financially benefiting from, a foreign government. Without such a law, she said in a statement, former U.S. officials can “monetize their work for our government into lucrative contracts with foreign governments.”
Meanwhile, the financial benefits of the Saudi relationship with Trump and Kushner continue.
Trump is slated to hold three more LIV tournaments on his properties this year.
And Kushner reportedly has raised at least another $500 million for his company from international investors since he filed the SEC form last year, bringing the total to around $3 billion.
He has not identified the source of that additional money.
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Demonstrators gather during a Planned Parenthood Day of Action Rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 9, 2021. (photo: Desiree Rios–Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Judges Denied a 14-Year-Old's Request for an Abortion. Twice.
Carter Sherman, Vice
Sherman writes: "In a new report about minors denied abortions in Florida, judges evidently deemed one kid too shy to be mature enough for an abortion, and another too curt."
In a new report about minors denied abortions in Florida, judges evidently deemed one kid too shy to be mature enough for an abortion, and another too curt.
Just a few days before her 15th birthday, the 14-year-old appeared in front of a Florida court and asked for permission to get an abortion.
This girl said that her mother lived in Guatemala and that she had lost touch with her father after he moved away—making it likely impossible for her to get their permission to get an abortion, which minors are required to do under Florida law.
Two courts denied the girl’s request for the abortion, which she made back in 2020. Advocates don’t know whether she ended up giving birth and, ultimately, if she became a child raising a child.
The girl lived with a pair of adults and her 17-year-old boyfriend, who supported her, though she was still going to school. She wanted an abortion, she told the court, “because I don't have any other choice.”
A report from Human Rights Watch, released Thursday, found that this unnamed 14-year-old is far from the only young girl to have been denied an abortion by a Florida court over the last 15 years. In Florida, as in several other states, if a minor wants to get an abortion without alerting their parents, they have to undergo an arduous process known as a “judicial bypass,” where they go to a court and ask for a judge’s permission to get the procedure.
Florida makes no exceptions for children who may have gotten pregnant through rape or incest, including by a parent. If a child in the foster care system wants an abortion, they have no choice but to pursue a judicial bypass, because they legally have no guardian who can sign off on their abortion.
In total, over the last 15 years, Florida courts have told at least 342 minors that they cannot legally get abortions without parental permission. According to their report, one girl was apparently deemed too shy to be mature enough for an abortion, while another seemed too curt. Yet another girl was already a single mom who worked full time, which should have meant that she didn’t need a court’s permission to get an abortion. However, neither her attorney nor the judge appeared to know that, and her request for an abortion was denied, by two different counts. (The mom was ultimately able to get an abortion.)
Judges denied the 14-year-old’s request for an abortion in 2020 because there were questions about the location of her mother and her credibility, according to court documents reviewed by VICE News. They felt that the girl hadn’t demonstrated that she was sufficiently mature or understood abortions well enough. (American adults are infamously ill-informed about abortion, even after the downfall of Roe. In a recent poll conducted by Ipsos and NPR, at least a third of Americans could not answer basic questions about abortion.) Evidently, they did not have the same concerns about whether she was mature enough to become a parent.
“Although she made decent grades in school, her answers to the questioning of counsel and the trial court were vague, and our review of her testimony supports the trial court's finding that she was unable to articulate her understanding of the procedure,” an appeals court judge wrote. “Furthermore, there is nothing in the record to refute the trial court's assessment of her demeanor as ‘present[ing] as a very young, immature woman.’”
“I’m always heartbroken to see these statistics because we don’t know what happens after a young person is denied and denied again on appeal,” said Annie Filkowski, policy and political director of Planned Parenthood of South, East, and North Florida. “We just simply don’t. And that sort of question mark there is pretty heartbreaking.”
Another Florida girl was initially denied an abortion in part because of her low GPA and because she doesn’t care for any younger siblings. An appeals court later reversed that denial, pointing out that the lower-court judge may have misunderstood how her GPA worked and, moreover, that the girl didn’t have any younger siblings in the first place.
“There’s a lot of passive aggressive statements,” said Kristen Flynn, an attorney who has represented minors in judicial bypass cases. “One judge told a child that, ‘Just because I’m signing this doesn’t mean that you have to do it.’”
Judges often ask minors deeply personal questions, which can trip minors up if they’re not adequately prepared by an attorney, Flynn said. “If it’s a child that’s been abused and/or raped, then you’re in a situation where they have to talk about the abuse. They have to be retraumatized and basically tell their story again.”
Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro, executive director of the reproductive justice-supporting Florida Access Network, underwent a judicial bypass in Florida in 2009, when she was 17 years old. (At the time, Florida required that minors tell a parent that they wanted an abortion, not get their parent’s consent.) When Piñeiro met with the judge, she had already secured the help of a lawyer, so she brought her resume, a transcript, an essay, and legal documentation of the abuse she had survived at her home.
“It was an unnecessary hurdle that only created more stress, only forced me to remain pregnant longer, only made me consider all the different ways to end my own pregnancy if they said no,” she said, adding that the judicial bypass process took three weeks. “The state’s intention in having these laws existing around parental involvement, parental consent are only to force young people to remain pregnant against their will as punishment for getting pregnant in the first place.”
In 2019, Piñeiro authored a study with the legal advocacy group If/When/How that studied Florida counties’ preparedness to help minors navigate the judicial bypass process. She found that more than half of the counties were unprepared; court personnel frequently said that they had never heard of judicial bypasses.
Florida, which now has a 15-week abortion ban on the books, is far from the only state that requires minors either get a judicial bypass or tell their parents if they want an abortion. It’s one of six states that mandate minors who want abortions to both tell at least one parent and get their consent before the procedure, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion restrictions. Ten states require that the minor at least notify one parent of the abortion, while 20 states require that a minor obtain the consent of at least one parent.
There are signs that breaking these laws, in a post-Roe v. Wade United States, is only going to become more dangerous. On Monday, Idaho lawmakers introduced a bill that would charge people with human trafficking if they help them get abortions without their parents’ permission. It would be illegal to even help minors go out of state for abortions—a clear attempt to cut off interstate travel for abortion, or as anti-abortion activists call it, “abortion tourism.”
“Young people are used as political fodder to test how laws will look,” Piñeiro said.
To be sure, hundreds of Florida minors have been able to secure abortions through judicial bypasses, according to the Human Rights Watch report. However, researchers found that the share of young people who had their requests for abortions denied increased in 2020 and 2021, after Florida passed a bill to tighten its rules around judicial bypasses. In 2020, more than 13 percent of all judicial bypass requests were denied, quadruple the number of denials in 2007.
Relatively few petitions are ever appealed. Human Rights Watch was only able to unearth nine appealed petitions from between 2020 and 2022.
Researchers also discovered that minors’ success seemed to depend heavily on where they went to court. In 2021, seven of Florida’s 67 counties received 65 percent of all petitions for judicial bypasses. Four of those seven counties didn’t deny a single petition, while Palm Beach County denied one in 10 petitions and Broward denied one in 16.
But Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, denied more than half of all petitions in 2021. That’s even more than in 2020, when Hillsborough County denied nearly 40 percent of all petitions.
“Your zip code should not determine whether or not you have access to abortion. So we see some counties that don’t deny anyone and then you look at Hillsborough, and they have a 50-percent denial rate,” said Filkowski. “It makes you wonder, are young people in Hillsborough overall insufficiently mature or do we have judges weaponizing their power in these situations?”
In Filkowski’s view, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to be rewarding people for being tough on abortion. After Judge Jared E. Smith denied a girl’s judicial bypass petition partly over her GPA, Smith lost a re-election campaign. Afterward, however, DeSantis appointed him to a state appeals court.
Filkowski expects to see more abortion restrictions introduced in Florida this year. She also sees a line between abortion rights for minors and the ongoing attacks on LGBTQ youth in Florida.
“We see the weaponization of ‘parents’ rights’ to strip young people’s bodily autonomy,” she said. “We’re really up against it here. When you look at what we [are] doing for young people, the governor has twice-vetoed bipartisan-supported for funding of birth control, he’s attacking sexual health education, banning abortion, and burning the candle at both ends here.”
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Ben Jealous takes the lead at the Sierra Club at a pivotal moment for the organization. (photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images/Stand Up America)
As the Sierra Club Reckons with Its Past, a New Leader Charts a More Inclusive Future
Manuela Lopez Restrepo, NPR
Restrepo writes: "For many American environmental advocates, acknowledging the exclusionary past of the movement is key to making progress now. One man knows this intimately."
For many American environmental advocates, acknowledging the exclusionary past of the movement is key to making progress now. One man knows this intimately.
Who is he? Ben Jealous is the new executive director of the Sierra Club, an environmental organization that "fights for environmental and social justice." But he's no stranger to the world of civil rights and social advocacy.
- Jealous served as the CEO and president of the NAACP, the youngest person to ever hold both positions.
- He was also president of People For the American Way, an advocacy organization dealing with civil liberties, advocacy, and social justice to combat far-right movements.
- And he was the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland in 2018, which was ultimately won by then incumbent Larry Hogan.
- As the new executive director of the Sierra Club, he will be the first person of color to ever hold the role.
What's the big deal? Though the Sierra Club is known for leading the way in environmental advocacy and protection in the United States, it has also received heavy criticism for a history built upon ideas of white supremacy and racism.
What's he saying?
In an interview with NPR, Jealous outlined how things have changed:
[When discussing historical movements] like the women's rights movement, and the gay rights movement, all of them have histories of being racially exclusionary. For the Sierra Club right now, the reality is that the urgency of the work on the ground has required people to really shift, I'd say, in many ways, from Hurricane Katrina forward. I think that's probably a pretty good line for the movement to try to figure out how to work across all lines of division.
And he outlined how the Sierra Club can move beyond its complicated past:
The priority is to move forward. I come into this role as a Black guy who started a major environmentalist group when I was 21 years old. There was one Black executive at the time. And then on my first day, they felt obligated to put me in their office and say, "How does it feel to work for a white organization, and know that's not going to change soon?"
I've served on the board of multiple environmentalist groups. There's none more diverse, more inclusive, than the Sierra Club. Our reckoning that happened, the debate that happened is, frankly, evidence of a very healthy, dynamic group that is doing the real work of becoming ever more inclusive.
So, what now?
- Jealous says there is a "very urgent" need for more environmental victories.
- He cites the Sierra Club's role in shutting down coal-fired power stations, and says the course of action is to stay focused on their climate goals that are connected to racial equity, like shutting down the plants to alleviate asthma in the Black community.
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